Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas
Tale is a movie that will have hardcore art-film enthusiasts
raving and everybody else snoozing. Yes, it's true that the
movie is darn amazing on a technical level: it tells the story
of an extended-family of 15 gathering over Christmas and never
loses sight of a single character. Every persona is
well-developed and the viewer feels like they know each of them.
Ice the cake with some lovely cinematography courtesy of veteran
Eric Gautier and you've got yourself what would seem like a
masterpiece on the surface.
And yet A Christmas Tale is no
masterpiece. In fact, it may not even be a good movie. The
reason is simple: however well-constructed its characters and
situations are, they never connect with the audience on an
emotional level. Desplechin's work is so technically competent
that it practically begs to be viewed as an exercise rather than
the deeply poignant experience it should be. There is a sense
that the filmmaker loses touch with his characters by
overanalyzing them; they should be rough around the edges but
the film's execution doesn't allow for this.
Desplechin's overzealousness in A
Christmas Tale does not just show in the fact that he spends
a lot of time indulging in each of his characters. It also rears
its ugly head when he structurally implies up-front that the
experience will be a greatly emotional one. Desplechin inserts
all of the film's conflicts and dramatic meat into the first act
of the movie—we learn right away that the family's matriarch,
Junon (Catherine Denuve), has been diagnosed with terminal
leukemia; that she lost a 7-year-old son decades ago, likely
because she passed the disease on; that her next-eldest son,
Ivan (Melvil Poupard), became her favorite child because he took
the deceased's place; and that her youngest, Henri (Mathieu
Amalric), will soon be giving her a bone-marrow transplant
despite being banished from the family in a legal-agreement by
her depressed daughter, Elizabeth (Anne Consigny) —to show that
he's going to use the rest of the movie to work on
emotional-development. (If that sentence seemed long and
complicated, then the movie, which plays like 25 of them strung
together, isn't for you.) Oh, and don't forget that A
Christmas Tale is indeed about its titular holiday, meaning
its frontloaded structure suggests a genre-defying movie in and
of itself because, after all, when was the last time you saw a
Christmas movie about character development?
The above represents precisely the
irony of A Christmas Tale: it focuses so much on
developing its characters and yet the characters never once move
the audience. Part of this is because they collectively
represent a dysfunctional family and dysfunctional families are
rarely involving when their antics aren’t in some way true to
life or neurotically funny (forget about touching). But a lot of
it is because Desplechin just wants the film to be perfect,
which is the antithesis of what his characters are. They should
be a family of humans experiencing authentic problems as
they come together to celebrate a holiday; instead, they're
pawns in an artistically-drunken Christmas carol that wants to
make sure you know it's not like the rest of its kind. The
result is a work that will leave most viewers yawning well
before its cumbersome 152 minutes have passed.
-Danny Baldwin, Bucket Reviews
Review Published on: 11.2.2008
Screened on: 10.28.2008 at the
Lionsgate Screening Room in Santa Monica, CA.